8BitGuy1
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First video reveal of Planet X2 for the Commodore 64
🕑 Added 2017-03-26 23:23:21 +0000 UTC My mother-in-law passed away this week, so I haven't gotten any video work done. So I thought I'd let out a preview of the game I've been working on to keep your retro appetites wet. I've been working on this for months now. However, I was building the game in separate pieces, such as the music routine, the tile editor, the map editor, etc. It's now finally coming together so you can see how I envisioned it to be.I'm not ready for beta-testers yet. But I could use some input on some different ideas I had to see what would be more popular. So maybe you guys could answer these questions for me:
1) Format: Originally I wanted this to be on a cartridge only. However, it's looking like that would push the game price up to around $50 or more per game. I don't know what people would be willing to pay for something like that. So give me an idea what is a reasonable price for the game, and also how the price should vary if it were released on floppy disk, or digitally for a download. Also, would a digital release devalue your feeling of owning a cartridge version of the game?
2) Ports - If this game becomes popular, I would want to consider porting it to other platforms. I wanted to briefly mention other platforms I've thought of and what challenges and benefits there would be. I'd like to hear your vote as to which other platform(s) should be prioritized.
The Commodore 128 is an obvious target because porting would be super easy. However, the only real advantage would be the extra RAM and thus I could possibly include a more sophisticated soundtrack. The soundtrack I'm using now is designed to fit inside 2K, because memory is highly constrained on this game. But I could allocate a lot of extra RAM on the 128.
The Commodore Plus/4 would be another easy port. However, there wouldn't be any significant advantages on this machine other than a little extra color. The Plus/4 wasn't super popular so there probably isn't much demand for it.
The Apple II series is also 6502 based, so maybe 50% of the game logic would port over without any re-write. But it would be a significant challenge to get the game working on that platform, especially being I'm not all that familiar with programming it. The music would probably disappear unless I supported the mockingboard.. all of this would be a huge challenge for me.
The Atari 8-Bit systems would be about the same amount of work as the Apple II. It is 6502 based, but the graphics and sound are totally different.
The Nintendo Entertainment System is also 6502-based, and would also present even more challenges because it has no keyboard. So I'd have to change the entire interface to the game to deal with that.
MS-DOS computers (I'm thinking IBM XT and AT machines) would make a good target. But it would require a total re-write, but at least I do know how to code in x86 assembly. But I do think the user-based is much larger, and obviously the game would work on much newer and faster machines besides a 286. The question is... which graphics to support? VGA seems like a no-brainer. But I don't think it would offer any significant experience difference over EGA. However, considering how basic the graphics are, I think the game would probably play well with CGA. But then there is also the Tandy 1000 to consider.
I'm afraid the Amiga, and Tandy CoCo, and the Macintosh would be off the table. I simply don't know how to code for those CPUs
3) OK.. so the next question has to do with the maps. I've been debating on whether or not the player should be able to see scaled previews of the entire maps. I mean, part of this game is meant to deal with exploration. So if you have seen a preview of a map, that takes something away from the exploration. However, Ultima did give the users cloth maps of Brittania. I plan to include at least 20 different maps in this game that the player will be able to select, adding more variety to the game play. But should the be able to see them before they play them?
I will have more questions eventually. But I'd like to start with people's opinions on these 3 questions.
